Pixar Announcements: New Versions, New Product, and More

With SIGGRAPH just around the corner, Pixar today announced some nice upgrades and new additions to their products with unlimited threading, RenderMan® Pro Server™ 15.0 and Tractor™1.0 RenderMan® Pro Server™ 15.0 and Tractor™1.0. Unlimited threading will enable users to have each license of RenderMan to utilize any number of threads on multi-core platforms, unlike the current release which allows only four threads per license.

RenderMan Pro Server 15.0 has several new features, including new volume primitives and improved volumetric rendering, major additions to the RenderMan Shader Language (RSL), Disney’s Ptex per face painted textures, imager shaders, an API for subdivision surfaces, performance improvements and more. Pro Server is currently in late beta testing and scheduled to be released in the fall of 2009. Pixar is also releasing Tractor 1.0, a new robust distributed render management solution built on an architecture designed to handle the largest multi-core render farms of tens of thousands of cores or more.

Click through for the full press release and more details.

EMERYVILLE, CA – (July 30th, 2009) Pixar Animation Studios made three major product announcements to users of the studios’ Academy Award® winning RenderMan® software and to every artist and studio creating cinematic quality imagery. The first announcement is unlimited threading across all RenderMan Products, the second is the upcoming release of RenderMan Pro Server 15.0, and the third is Tractor™ 1.0, Pixar’s new render management solution engineered for computing networks of unprecedented scale.

Unlimited threading will enable studios and artists to maximize the power of their render farms, allowing each license of RenderMan to utilize any number of threads on the latest multi-core platforms. RenderMan Pro Server 15.0 will be the first product to introduce unlimited threading when it is released in the fall of 2009. This will be followed with unlimited threading for RenderMan Studio and RenderMan for Maya.

The forthcoming RenderMan Pro Server 15.0 is a key component of Pixar’s core rendering technology and introduces several powerful new capabilities, including true volume primitives, major additions to the RenderMan Shader Language (RSL), Disney’s Ptex per face painted textures, imager shaders, an API for subdivision surfaces, and more. This release will also include significant performance enhancements for rendering production scenes, including optimized memory management and improved thread scalability.

Finally, Pixar is also releasing Tractor 1.0, a new industrial-strength distributed render management solution built on an architecture designed to handle the largest multi-core render farms of tens of thousands of cores or more.  Tractor’s streamlined design simplifies deployment, configuration, and control while emphasizing scalability and performance of the job queuing engine.  Tractor 1.0 has been built from the ground up using proven, open, and extendable web standards to remove pipeline integration and administration barriers, allowing the render farm to leverage commodity web technologies, tools, and practical expertise.

“With RenderMan Pro Server 15.0, Pixar has changed the way we approach volumetric phenomena.” said Rob Pieké, R&D Lead at The Moving Picture Company. “Thanks to direct support for volume rendering and color bleeding, we have been able to greatly simplify our work-flow for rendering dust, spray, smoke and fire, while enhancements to the implicit field sampling allow us to produce images faster than ever.”

“RenderMan’s widespread use among facilities whose reputation depends on creating consistently excellent imagery is telling.” said John Knoll, Visual Effects Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic. “RenderMan’s extreme flexibility, quality, and scalability have made it the standard among professionals that it is today.”

Availability
RenderMan Pro Server 15.0 is compatible with Mac OS X, Linux 32 and 64 bit, Windows XP 32 bit, Windows Vista 64 bit and Windows Vista 64 bit HPC Server. All RenderMan Pro Server customers on current maintenance will receive unlimited threading at the version 15.0 upgrade. Separate upgrade pricing from RenderMan Pro Server 14.0 to 15.0 will also be available. Customers of RenderMan Studio and RenderMan for Maya will receive unlimited threading in new versions to be announced later in 2009. Tractor 1.0 is initially compatible with Linux 32 and 64 bit and OS X and will be available as an upgrade to all RenderMan Studio customers. It will also be available as a separately priced product. In addition, Pixar’s maintenance program benefits customers with access to ongoing support and free upgrades for an annual price. For more information please visit www.pixar.com or contact [email protected].

About Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is an Academy Award®-winning film studio with world-renowned technical, creative and production capabilities in the art of computer animation.  Creator of some of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time, including Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL•E and most recently, Up. The Northern California studio has won 21 Academy Awards® and its ten films have grossed more than $5 billion at the worldwide box office to date. The next film release from Disney•Pixar is Toy Story 3 (June 18, 2010).